Mark Of Cain
by joonbugs
Summary: From a world at war to the top assassin of a Cold War terrorist organization to a future of gods and monsters, Salome Jager has survived it all. Salome became the subject of the Red Skull's torment and later, the first successful HYDRA super solider. Except, her super human abilities came with a price, poisonous skin. Anyone who touched her dropped dead. She was reborn as a weapon.


Life in the cell was life in retrograde. The darkness was thick, viscous; it was a bloody, hot thing, surrounding, suffocating, it was the walls of a tomb, the walls of a womb. She couldn't quite tell if she was dead or being reborn. There was no realization of a corporeal form laid out before her eyes. Twin chains were wrapped around her wrists and ankles, only real when the steel dug into her skin, soft and supple and sinking into the abyss, biting and scratching until every molecule has been rubbed raw. Only real when she pulls against them, half a dream, half a nightmare, and wholly a ghost, when they rattle out their jeering, cruel prison song.

Time has seeped away in the cell, weeping, escaping, into the cracks in the damp stone that her toes sometimes trace in a daze. Sleep sometimes whisks her away in short-lived fantasies that leave her less and less real every time she drifts away. Dreams do not welcome her. There is no distinction between her current abyss and the next. She forgets that a world exists outside this one, that color exists in violent, eager explosions, people bustle about in a hurried, hungry knot of strings, and that once she had a face, a name.

Existence marches on without her, heavy-laden but not burdened by the in between. What is simply is. She is not but is. There is nothing for her but the eternal swoop of a question mark.

At some point, the growl of her stomach had dulled into a burning emptiness and the dryness of her mouth became nothing more than a crisp, stabbing air. Water and food by now had sunk deep into the crevices of her mind. Concepts, surely, yet she couldn't picture the exact sensation, just grabbed uncertainly at echoes.

Pain keeps her awake, keeps her stuck in the between. Neither dead nor born.

Words dissipate each moment from her mind, letters in a bottle, swallowed by the sea, each swimming desperately for a port to make them tangible again, said, read, or written. She barely can recite the alphabets that she once knew in a familiarity that could only be described as instinct. Astral projections of a moment that was once a feeling that is wound together then sundered and the remains bounce around in her head. It is either the remnants of the aftermath or the whispers of a beginning that stick to her skin.

Memories. _Memories_. Memories. _Memories! _To forget means that something was once there to be remembered.

She is a memory. Life is a memory. The world is a memory.

A memory is a truth and a lie.

• • •

They came when breathing was an afterthought, not a reminder. No, no. It was dawn on chilly... No! Summer was not cold, it was a chill, she had carried a chill the moment she awakened that day. The house always groaned with aches of age, but that day its creaks crescendoed into screams. Paris stood, cramped with multitudes of screaming homes, as a beacon of decadence, the apex of human vanity and beauty. With their starving machines and iron fists, it was everything they hated.

For some, arrogant, ridden with rotten pride, evacuating the city was not an option. They would stand with her, cupping her sacred hands in theirs.

There was a war. From the east charged the Germans, bulldozing the defending troops like they were nothing more than papier-mache men. And here, the heart of the west, stood France.

She was not French, nor was she German. Her family came from a long line of Hungarian Jews, nestled in the rolling green that blanketed the shores of Lake Balaton. They'd spent her dozen or so childhood years there, in a quaint cottage with a vegetable garden and a makeshift boat her brother and cousins had spent summers building. Then the men who spoke of snakes and salvation came. After that, they stole away in the night and remade themselves in Paris.

The Germans found them anyways.

Their house was on the corner of the street, 119 Quai de Valmy, parallel to Canal Saint-Martin. The old building was made of crumbling brick and rusting copper. Her family occupied the second floor, in a cozy apartment, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen and living room packed into a small space. She shared a room with her brother, who was seven years her junior. When they came, she was nineteen.

Her father refused to leave, even though her mother had begged and begged, literally on her hands and knees, that they flee to America. She could only guess why her father decided to stay. He never confided in her. Maybe he was tired of running. Maybe he was fatally optimistic in the French's ability to stave off the German war machine. His reasoning did not matter.

(Recalling such things does not matter. Not anymore. She knows that in this cell she is dead already. But she does so anyway.)

She could remember the apartment on that day in excruciating detail. When she awoke, she'd stared at her work uniform, sleep weighing heavy on her eyes. For a pause, she could almost trick herself into believing this was a normal day; that she would slip on her corduroy pencil skirt, button-up her milky blouse, and pinch her toes into her battered Oxfords. She'd swing by the kitchen, grab a slice of bread and pick up a bottle of milk left on their doorstep. First, she'd spend the first hours of her day tidying up, picking up the mail, doing the laundry, and running errands for someone else's home. She had four main customers: Lorraine, the American who came to Paris to kick start her career in art, Mr. Baudin, a lonely widower who spent his time sinking his money into the pub, Madame Garnier, an aristocrat who'd rather spend her time at parties than taking care of her husband's sprawling property, and the Leon family, who were poorer than her family, but the father was a butcher and repaid her in cuts he'd normally discard. After that, she'd spend her evenings running the ticket booth at the movers. On occasion, her boss would let her rewatch a tape for a reduced price after hours.

On the other side of the room, her brother's bed was neatly made, but his toys were strewn chaotically about the floor. There wasn't much variety, a yo-yo that had to be re-tied several times to keep functioning was untangled at the foot of the bed, a make-shift Meccano set collected from pieces at the factory her father could pocket, and a toy car with the back-right wheel missing. His favorite though, the ratty teddy bear named Ralph, with button eyes half-way from falling off and an arm from her old Raggedy Anne doll sewn on to its left shoulder, was nowhere to be found.

The closet was ajar, with only half of the clothes left, most of which were her own. It didn't take her long to register what was happening and she tumbled out of bed. She didn't bother changing out of her night-slip, even though she would be reprimanded for her indecency. Flying out the bedroom door, she passed the bathroom, where the cabinet was left open, with various items spilling out into the sink and onto the floor. A pill bottle was uncapped, and the tiny white capsules gathered at the drain. Toothbrushes scattered the tiles, one even balanced delicately on the toilet seat. The mess was just a further indication of her growing suspicions.

They were leaving, her mother and her brother. They were leaving her behind. It made her world spin, thinking that her own mother would leave her here to die with her father. To die because of his sinful pride.

When she reached the living room, they were at the door. Her father sat on the couch, crumpled over like the piece of paper ripped from a typewriter and crushed by an ink-splotted hand. Softly, like the branches of a willow tree in the breeze, his shoulders shook as he wept quietly. She had expected a cacophony of violent, stricken noise. (That would come later.)

Mother and son were braced against the wall, one's soft, wrinkled hand wrapped around the doorknob. Her mother shrouded her dark torrential curls in a deep red silk headscarf, swathed her shoulders in a florally embroidered shawl her own mother had made her, and in her other hand, she gripped a suitcase. Matyas, her brother, clung to their mother's raggedy skirt, red-rimmed eyes wide with terror, tears falling in glossy rivets down his rosy cheeks, while snot gathered around his tiny button nose. He had always been small for his age, but now, he was so small she could've held him in one of her palms.

"Salome," came the sweet gravel of her mother's voice. When their eyes met, her feet sunk so far into the ground, she could feel the viscous heat of the earth's core burn her soles.

(Her name was Salome. It meant "peace." Her mother was Maja and her father Gabor. Names didn't matter here, but she remembered it anyway. Remembered it so hard that she retched on her own bile. "Salome," she whispered to herself. She blinked. Suddenly, her body felt so heavy that she was surprised the ground didn't crumble beneath her.)

Her mouth opened to begin to scream, to question her until her throat went raw. Instead, a muted, stuttering cry parted her lips. Her father still wouldn't look up, firmly anchored into the torn canvas of the couch cushions. Salome stepped forward, breath flimsy in her lungs. "You can't."

"We have to," said her mother. They were both fully aware that the government had fled Paris four days prior, showing the city that even at the apex of their country, none had faith in their continued independence. Her mother knew the nature of what would happen next. The Germans storming the country, the sweep of every residence, and the brutality those who resisted would face.

They both knew what they were. (Jew. Zsidó. Juden.)

Maja had a sister in Poland, Greta, and a brother in Germany, Marcell, who had sent her letters in the years leading up to the war. They both reported a grim future. Not only that but rumors spread like wildfire. Maja knew what would happen to Salome and Gabor if she took Matyas and left. They'd end up dead or worse.

She didn't know who to direct her rage at, her mother who was abandoning her, or her father, who could've saved them from this very fate. So, it turned inward, corroding her organs and gnawing at her bones, until she collapsed to the ground from the pain.

Salome gasped, clutching at her chest, as her lungs contracted at the speed of a hummingbird's wings, except at the same time its wings were clipped so that it could not fly. Her eyes burned, but she did not cry. Still, her father remained fetal. "Are you just going to sit there?"

Nothing left her father except for sad, wilting rasp.

Again, she looks to her mother. "You'll leave me here? To be brutalized? To die?"

Her mother's grip on the doorknob tightened. Matyas began to sob so violently he hiccups in between wails. "You do not need me. I cannot protect you." What she left unsaid rings in Salome's ears. _I will not die with you._

"You are my mother."

"I am his mother too." Maja nodded towards Matyas. He turned into her skirt and continued to cry, his sad, wet sounds, muffled by the cloth. She used her other arm, holding the suitcase, to envelop him. Nervously, her eyes swung up to peer through the peephole. "We must go."

"Without us," Salome said. The words coated her mouth in molten steel. Her jaw clicked as her mouth slammed shut. She would not cry out for her. Not even for her baby brother, who she had rocked in her arms, singing to him gently, as a babe. The same brother who had slept in her cot after nightmares disturbed his sleep, arms wrapped around her waist. It was not fair that he would live and she would not.

But as they were arguing, they had forgotten to pay attention to the baritone rumble of tanks as they thundered against the ground, moving against the paved streets of Paris. It was not until the soldiers were rushing up the stairs of their apartment building did they realize it was too late.

For a minute, Salome's heart swelled with a sickening sense of victory. They would all die there. Together.

(She supposed it was her punishment for thinking such thoughts. That she got to live.)

Several voices danced together in a violent clatter at their doorstep. Salome pieced together the German with ease. It had been on of her father's many lessons, learning the language of the land around them. He did not teach her the language of violence.

They demanded to be let in. When their house remained silent, save for the rush of her mother's footsteps and her brother's cries as they hid themselves in the closet.

A battering ram cracked open the wood of their door and in flooded a small gaggle of soldiers. German. Dressed in black, dressed like death cometh.

"_Where is Dr. Jager?_"

Two soldiers grabbed Salome from underneath her shoulders, yanking her upwards with harsh hands. She let out a meek cry. Their gloved hands tightened their hold on her as they escorted her to a chair and tossed her into it. Another solider approached and put the barrel of his rifle to the side of her skull. Salome gripped the arms of the chair and closed her eyes. Silently, she cried.

When she was young, their trips to the synagogue often ended with her bent over her mother's knee, being lashed for godless talk. Salome had a habit of asking too many questions. Truthfully, she had a mere curiosity for the teachings of her religion. What many mistook for sinful belligerence was really a genuine interest in her faith. And sometimes that meant questioning her God.

As she got older, when she saw the hatred in people's hearts, it was harder to find hope in the teachings that had once anchored her. Frequently, she mused that there was no God to watch over her. If there was, she thought, he must be remarkably cruel.

Salome prayed for his kindness in that moment with the cold press of a rifle against her forehead. She faced the darkness behind her eyelids and she was afraid. There was nothing more terrifying than the cessation of any and all feeling. Just the embrace of the yawning abyss.

(Here in the darkness, she has coined the black sea of nothingness a friend, a companion.)

Beneath her, she can hear the frantic prayers of her father, his voice strained and cracking in his native Hungarian. Before when he spoke in the tongue of his homeland, it was viscous, warm and sweet like honey. Now, it wws breathless, each word like the click of a gun filtering through empty chambers.

A groan left her father and her eyes fluttered open. One of the soldiers had kicked him, like a stray dog, and he's keeled over, sobbing in pain. The man spit on her father. Not satisfied with his suffering, but disgusted his existence allows him to.

Agony built up in her throat as Salome held back a scream of grief.

"_Dr. Jager_."

Salome turned her head slightly to witness a new man waltz into their apartment. A flash of gold reveals a skull pinned to his shoulder.

Her vision went black, then spotty with pinpricks of stabbing white. The soldier had slammed the butt of his rifle into her skull for so much as a glance. Blood, hot and burning, trickled down her forehead.

"_Where is the wife? The son?_"

To her left, a man signaled with a jerk of his hand and a group of three began ransacking the house. They tore apart places that no human could possible hide away in. Plates are shattered, precious belongings are crushed beneath boots as they march towards the next cabinet to be thrown open and raided.

Finally, the closet was thrown open and her mother and brother fall out onto the living room floor like dominoes. Matyas began to sob in earnest, bleeding, wet noise falling from his lips as he grabbed at his mother's skirts like they'd shield them. _Bang! _He screamed. Someone had shot his hand.

Her mother made no move to comfort him. Her head was tilted down and she sat as still as a statue. She was the image of piety, of surrender.

Salome wonders if she looked to God in those moments, too.

If she did, he did not answer.

"_Shoot them_."

The first time Salome died, it started with a bang.

One-shot. Two-shots. Gunshots were always brief, curtains close with a snap as you fall to the ground and the sound echoed like applause.

The massacre was always quick. Clean and efficient, as if a surgeon were to remove a tumor. Simple, one pulled on the trigger and you had a corpse on your hands.

Her mother was first. She fell to the ground with a dull thud. On her face plastered a stony, eternal submission. For a moment, Salome pretended that she was asleep, her eyes closed in peaceful rest.

The blood did not lie. It simply spilled and spilled, a red sea of holy proportions.

Matyas clawed at her body. Hollering and howling until he fell over her back, a river of red pouring from his little head of curls.

(There are no words for the hell she witnessed. Even as she sat in that cell, wasting away with nothing but her own head for comfort, nothing could describe that feeling—)

Salome had begun to scream. In her head. From her chest. She screamed in her heart, in her blood, in her bones. She screamed and screamed until she was beaten down to the ground. A rifle drove into her back. Her bones cracked like a forest being timbered. Her head crashed into the floor, the blood splattering across her face and blouse, the cutting taste of metal meeting her tongue as she sobbed silently into the mess.

Together.

(They should've died together.)

Polished boots made their way in front of her, and she knew by the immaculate care of this man's clothes he was important. Important men stepped on unimportant people until they couldn't grow back and important men thought everyone else was unimportant.

"Pity," came the silky, deceiving voice, smooth as snake scales. "What a pretty family."

The man knelt down until she could feel the knives of his eyes twisting into her wounds. "Your daughter has grown well, Dr. Jager."

Salome wanted to spit in his face, to see every part of her burn him like acid, but her body fought against her. It wanted to live. She did not.

"Spare her, please," came a retching, heaving voice ragged with pain. The kind lisp still remained, and even with a gun to his head her father's voice sounded ever gracious.

"Oh, do not worry," the man said, brushing her sweat drenched hair from her bruising face, "I am no monster. She will make a fine pet."

She saw his feline smile eclipse in the peripheral of her vision and she knew that this game of cat and mouse has only just begun.


End file.
